Schooling in Capitalist America

              Bowles and Gintis discuss the Progressive era, 1890-1930, as the second major turning point in the history of the United States education system. They argue that the progressive movement led to the creation of a new educational philosophy, what they call a "child-centered" approach. Additionally, they discuss how high school became mass institution during this era and education became more of a priority for the United States. In this chapter, they discuss the economic and social trends occurring at this time, the politics or urban school reform, the vocational education movement and the emergence of education testing. For the purpose of this blog, I will discuss he politics of urban school reform and touch upon the emergence of education testing in relation to the capitalization of education and labor.

        First off, the politics of urban school reform is directly correlated to the economic and social trends occurring at this time. Bowles and Gintis state, "[T]he accumulation of capital and the extension of wage-labor system marked the continued expansion of the capital economy." In other words, capitalism was beginning to take place via the practice of a wage-labor system. Small, family owned businesses were losing money and capital to large-scale manufacturing companies. Additionally, immigration played an important role in the emergence of capitalism. Bowles and Gintis note that millions of Europeans peasants were driven out of their jobs once the United Stated entered the world economy because the United States was importing cheap grains. As a result, many of these peasants immigrated to the United States seeking jobs and worked for low wages, while profits were high. Clearly, these profits were not evenly distributed and only a few were becoming rich--in the essence of capitalism.

          Interestingly, urban school reform was being advocated for at this time. According to Bowles and Gintis, "The objective of the school reformers was to centralize control of education in the hands of experts." Unsurprisingly, those that were advocating for the centralized control of education were wealthier individuals--lawyers, businessmen, upper class women groups, school superintendents, university professors, etc--who were all white anglo-saxon protestants. However, there was a resistance on the behalf of urban ethnic communities in places like New York and San Francisco. More interesting, is the role of testing and tracking and streamlining the meritocracy. During this era, there were dozens of articles written about IQ tests--who was mentally capable and who wasn't--a lot of what not seems to have played into the negative perceptions people have of certain occupations like prostitution. This led to the creation of the legacy that the urban school reform movement left behind: strong upper class basis and its commitment to social control. Through the manipulation of labor and educational perceptions of individuals, the United States allowed its education system to serve as the basis for a capitalist society.

Exam II Review Sheet

Format of the Exam

The format of Midterm II will be as follows:

Part I:           One essay question, drawing from the entirety of the material covered since the previous exam. (35 Points)

Part II:            A selection of one among two possible essay questions, related to a specific topic covered in the readings or in lecture. (35 Points)

In both Part I and Part II, for which you will be required to write a single essay in each section, the strategy for acquiring the most points is roughly similar:

Be sure to identify what concepts are being raised in the question. Also define those concepts.

Be sure to marshal evidence in support of your claims.

Construct an argument. Remember that arguments do not make themselves; you must apply the concepts and evidence to construct an argument.

Construction of an argument is where you’ll pick up the most points. However, you’ll notice that you can’t construct a great argument until you’ve first defined the relevant concepts and marshalled evidence in support of your claims. A “C” grade will be awarded to responses that provide flawed arguments; a “B” grade will be awarded to arguments that are compelling but unsophisticated; an “A” grade will be awarded to responses that are compelling and above all creative.

Part III:          A selection of four among five possible definition questions. (20 Points)

In Part III, for which you will be required to define four terms, you will be invited to provide an illustrative example. You are not required to construct an argument for this section; you are simply required to demonstrate that you know what the concept means, and provide me an example of how that concept has been used. Each answer should require one or two, and at most three, sentences.

Part IV:          Five fill-in-the-blanks questions. (10 Points)

Part IV should be self-explanatory.

Material Covered in the Exam

In addition to the readings assigned before the previous exam, and material covered in lecture and section, you should be familiar with the following readings for Exam II:

1.     Hall, G. Stanley. 1904. Pp. v-ix and 325-360 in Adolescence: Its Psychology and Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education. NY: D. Appleton and Co.

2.     Bushman, Brad J. 2013. “Media Violence and Youth Violence.” Pp. 12-13 in Youth Violence: What We Need to Know – Report of the Subcommittee on Youth Violence of the Advisory Committee to the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate, National Science Foundation.  Washington, D.C.: National Science Foundation.

3.     Calvert, Sandra L. 2013. “Youth Violence: Influences of Exposure to Violent Media Content.” Pp. 14-15 in Youth Violence: What We Need to Know – Report of the Subcommittee on Youth Violence of the Advisory Committee to the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate, National Science Foundation.  Washington, D.C.: National Science Foundation.

4.     Downey, Geraldine. 2013. “Rejection and Lethal Violence”. Pp. 16-17 in Youth Violence: What We Need to Know – Report of the Subcommittee on Youth Violence of the Advisory Committee to the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate, National Science Foundation.  Washington, D.C.: National Science Foundation.

5.     Thrasher, Fredric. 1927. Pp. 9-19 in The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

6.     Beckman, Albert. 1932. “Juvenile Crime.” The Journal of Juvenile Research 16: 66-76.

7.     Gottfredson, Michael. 2013. “Some Key Facts about Criminal Violence Pertinent to the Relation of Self-Control to Violence.”  Pp. 23 in Youth Violence: What We Need to Know – Report of the Subcommittee on Youth Violence of the Advisory Committee to the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate, National Science Foundation.  Washington, D.C.: National Science Foundation.

8.     Dredze, Mark. 2013. “Understanding Factors of Youth Violence through the Study of Cyberbullying.” Pp. 27-28 in Youth Violence: What We Need to Know – Report of the Subcommittee on Youth Violence of the Advisory Committee to the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate, National Science Foundation.  Washington, D.C.: National Science Foundation.

9.     Neill, Daniel B. 2013. “Data Mining for Prediction of Youth Violence: Methods, Challenges, Open Questions.” Pp. 29-30 in Youth Violence: What We Need to Know – Report of the Subcommittee on Youth Violence of the Advisory Committee to the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate, National Science Foundation.  Washington, D.C.: National Science Foundation.

10.  Coleman, James S. 1961. “The Emergence of an Adolescent Subculture in Industrial Society.” Pp. 1-10 in The Adolescent Society. NY: Free Press.

11.  Morrill, Calvin. 2013. “A Brief Look at Sociological Perspectives on Peer Hierarchies, Organizational Conditions in Schools, and Youth Violence and Conflict.” Pp. 20-22 in Youth Violence: What We Need to Know – Report of the Subcommittee on Youth Violence of the Advisory Committee to the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate, National Science Foundation.  Washington, D.C.: National Science Foundation.

12.  David J. Harding, Living the Drama: Community, Conflict, and Culture among Inner-City Boys. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

We will set time aside to review materials both in this Tuesday’s (March 18^th) lecture, and in the sections meeting this week. I am also making myself available throughout this week for individual or group appointments, if requested. Please sympathize with the fact that I have work of my own to complete, so I will do my best to meet with you when possible, although this will be subject to other constraints.

Review Concepts

I’ve assembled a list of some of the ideas that we’ve gone over in lecture and in section. Note that this is not intended to be comprehensive – these are the key ideas, not all of the ideas we’ve covered. You should be familiar with them, and you should be able to apply them.

I’ve organized the concepts and scholars based on the theme under which they fell as we went through the material, but the taxonomy is not rigid (for example, Mead was an anthropologist rather than a psychologist). This is intended more to help you remember and to frame your thoughts than to determine what belongs with what.

 

	Psychology	Criminology	Sociology
Concepts	Storm and Stress	Human ecology	Subculture
	Moral development	Situation complex	Cultural heterogeneity
	Schema	Interstitial areas	Concentration of poverty
	Behavioral reinforcement	Technocracy	Code of the street/ Code of the state
	Rejection sensitivity	Administrative criminology	Sociospatial organization of inner-city violence
	Care Perspective	Critical/radical criminology	Macroeconomic/sociospatial transformation of inner-cities
	Justice Perspective	Action patterns	Neighborhood effects
	Recapitulation	Chicago School/ Berkeley School	Process turn in neighborhood effects research
	Gender difference	Gang	Institutional distrust
	Media effects	Social organization	Cross-cohort socialization
			Neighborhood identity
			Corporate and street gangs
			American apartheid
			Youth agency
Scholars	Stanley Hall	Fredric Thrasher	James Coleman
	Jean Piaget	August Vollmer	David Harding
	Lawrence Kohlberg		William Julius Wilson
	Carol Gilligan		Victor Rios
	Margaret Mead		Prudence Carter
			Signithia Fordham
			Karolyn Tyson
			John Ogbu

Methodology

Social network analysis (clique, density, opinion leader, bridging tie)

Correlation, temporal order, causation

Observational methods

Experimental methods

Risk factor approach

Outside-in

Inside-out

30 Million Word Gap

Dear LS104AC,

Here's more info on the '30 Million Word Gap' research discussed this past week during section.

Shifting Adolescent Subcultures

Adolescent years are unique because adolescents become more in tuned and engaged in adult-like activities such as sports, a more in depth learning in education, understanding social skills and responsibilities (e.g. chores, waking up on time to go to school etc.). Coleman points out the essence of overturning “natural processes”, where parents were the key teachers values, habits and skills geared towards societal reproduction. Due to the shift from societal simplicity to an industrial society we have carved out an arena of age segregation from institutionalization of education, specialization and social systems, divesting from the nuclear home. These years of liminality within this age group causes “subcultures” or “social organizations” to develop, where, as Coleman finds in his research, that friendship is the key driver of youth decision making rather than parent’s opinions for youths at school.

Coleman states that in order for adults to motivate youths in directions that are geared towards societal norms, we must, like Thrasher, understand the relationships within youth subcultures. Colman feels that by understanding the relationships between different subcultures or social organizations within the school, there can be a shift from a focus on individuals and move towards a shift in the whole culture of youth itself, creating a more influential tool for passing forth values and mores. As we learned from the socio-grams in lecture, the person with the most ties to other people within a social group are usually the “opinion leaders”, whose opinions can be very persuasive within that group.

This can be a strong strategy for shifting the climate within groups in general but to leave it at that would be too narrow. It can be argued that the climate in which this strategy successfully takes place would be under conditions where there is some stability at home for youths (financially, emotionally, physically etc.). Without these conditions I would say that the first steps of this shifting process would not even emerge because of the outside survival responsibilities that certain youths must take on, such as their basic needs. A person who goes without the basic needs of food, shelter and feeling safe may have many nodes within his “subculture” or “social organization” because being resourceful, both in negative and positive ways, can be the deciding factors of whether he and his family will eat dinner or not. This is not to say that this type of situation is immune to the “opinion leader” ideal, its not, but it would definitely be tougher to deter or shift ideology that stems from survival.

Therefore, for these “at-risk” youth subcultures there’s a need for basic living resources to alleviate the adult responsibilities that they are faced with daily in order to begin a conversation about their subculture and social organizations.

Deconstructing the Perception of Youth as Deviant Pre-Adults

Since Thrasher’s study on gangs, adolescent culture has often been presented by adult-controlled media as an assertion of separate existence and a means of exclusion from adult society sought by the youth in order to find an alternative forum of expression in self-created agencies. Coleman, in The Adolescent Society, unveils some of the patterns of behavior that perpetuate these adolescent subcultures by collecting data on youth perception of their attachment to parents and peers. In the context of this scholarly venture, he uncovered a set of changes in society that enforce an age segregation conducive to the progressive creation of adolescent subcultures. Particularly, Coleman contends, like Bourdieu, that schools have increasingly become a place of socialization for youth, taking on more functions and “forc[ing] children inward toward their own age group”. The author’s depiction of adolescents’ reclusion on their own peer group propels an interesting perspective on youth culture, deconstructing some of the assumptions often made by adults. Yet, by failing to acknowledge the interpretative margin left at the discretion of readers, the author falls short of his attempt not to cast a negative light on children whose family ties weaken significantly upon reaching adolescence.

The Second Chicago School was focusing at the time of Coleman’s writing on the study of deviance, culminating with Howard Becker’s 1963 publication of Outsiders. In his research, Becker explained how the first stage in the creation of deviance is to label certain activities as deviant, hence the crucial role of moral entrepreneurs who persuade society to develop rules consistent with their own interests and beliefs, endorsing certain norms in the public sphere. He argued that "social groups create deviance by making the rules whose infraction constitutes deviance” (Becker, 1963). From then on, the informational shortcut becomes too easy to be avoided and many adults are led to believe that adolescents who seclude themselves from the adult world are necessarily deviants who need to be treated. Adults perceive this distancing as a menace: out of control of adult institutions and encouraged by peers into independent thinking, youth become more critical of adult rule-makers and potentially threatening to social order.

By neglecting to set a tone to his work, Coleman vests too much interpretative power in readers. Depending on one’s own mindset, this extract from the first chapter of The Adolescent Society can become either a powerful piece empowering youth to find their own voice through adolescent subcultures and agencies or an additional support for adults seeking to expose the deviance of youth who break the rules of society by setting themselves apart from it. Coleman’s opinion is made evident in another piece where he delves more into the critical side of his argument, condemning the special programs in schools that look for those gifted children who shall be set apart from their peers to “rescue” them from the negative influence of an adolescent culture nonchalant towards scholastic matters, seen to be full of “irresponsibility and hedonism” (Coleman, 1959). 

BECKER, Howard Saul: Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance, New York, NY: The Free Press (1963)

COLEMAN, James Samuel: “The Adolescent Society: James Coleman's still-prescient insights” from Academic Achievement and the Structure of Competition in the Harvard Education Review, Volume 29, No. 4 (Fall 1959)

COLEMAN, James Samuel: The Adolescent Society: The Social Life of the Teenager and its Impact on Education, Glencoe, IL: The Free Press of Glencoe (1961)

THRASHER, Frederic Milton: The Gang, A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press (1927)

A Youth Subculture Perpetuated by Adults

In The Adolescent Society, Coleman argues that educating the youth is one of the fundamental tasks of society; however, with the changing dynamics of society, the “processes of education” have changed with the emergence of an industrial society and economic specialization. These changes force parents to send their children to formal educational institutions which supposedly offer tools for children to succeed in the modern day society. However, Coleman argues that the education of children in these institutions has created a completely separate subculture, one where adolescents become distanced from the rest of society and seek to identify more with their peers. This creates a social system where the goals of education become overshadowed by youth culture and the desire to fit in with their peers. Coleman supports his argument by presenting surveys of youth that show the shift from the want to fulfill their parents’ desires to the want to fit in with their peers.While Coleman presents the adolescent subculture as a problem of the youth, I contend that he fails to recognize the role adults play in this problem.

                 Coleman ignores the fact that although children spend a considerable time at school with their peers, they also spend a substantial time at home. The amount of time a child spends at home depends on a parent’s regulation and monitoring of their child’s activity. Before a youth turns into an adult, a parent has not only the right but also the responsibility to enforce these rules. Coleman also argues that “adolescents have become an important market, and special kinds of entertainment cater almost exclusively to them”. This relates to the idea of youth-as-consumers and the idea that youth have not only acquired greater spending power but also the ability to experiment with these forms of entertainment without adult supervision. I feel Coleman takes an adult-centered perspective by looking at the problem of separation of youth from adult society as a problem caused by youths without taking into account an adult’s involvement or lack thereof. While parents may not be able to provide formal education such as science or math, they still have the ability to teach their children moral values which shape their character and can affect a child’s decision making. Furthermore, it is up to the parents to regulate the type of entertainment their child is exposed to.

                The article “Kids online: parents, don’t panic” by Danah Boyd offers a different perspective on adolescent subculture. Boyd argues that social media has simply provided children with an easier way of talking with a large group of peers due to the limited free time of young adults who often participate in after-school activities or jobs. Although social media may contain some “unhealthy interactions” it contains information which can be educationally beneficial. Furthermore, Boyd observes that parents spend a great amount of time on their own electronic devices as their children do. Whether it be constantly checking their phone, or glued to the television, doesn’t this distance adults from youth?

Link to article: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/mar/01/young-people-online-parents-dont-panic-instagram-snapchat

Reading: The Adolescent Society: The Social Life of the Teenager and its Impact on Education, by James S. Coleman